


an owl in the hand is worth ten crows in the [writhing undead] bush

by Anusaya



Category: Katekyou Hitman Reborn!
Genre: 6996, F/M, Humor, Wat?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-12
Updated: 2012-05-12
Packaged: 2017-11-05 05:23:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,775
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/402889
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anusaya/pseuds/Anusaya
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The course of true love never did run smooth. [warning: my inability to be Srs.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	an owl in the hand is worth ten crows in the [writhing undead] bush

**Author's Note:**

> Just a little something to get me back into the fanficcing groove. >D
> 
> Awkward sex and/or shenanigans next, yes? :D

Chrome Dokuro, idly entertaining adolescent fantasies, held in particular one recurring dream: in tragedian stage tradition, Rokudo Mukuro, freed from Vendicare prison, lay bleeding and vulnerable in her white, open arms. The crystalline tears of a single eye would -- in this image -- sluice onto the curve of his cheek. Grasping her smaller hand (weakly) in his, he would, at long last, gaspingly declare his undying love.

Ironic, then, is the fact that opportunity comes in the form of the post-battle freedom of Mukuro-sama's body, bleeding on the ground, apt to her former imagery (albeit the blood is crustier to the touch; in the fiction of the mind, it runs Glistening Ruby Red or something of that nature, but in actuality it is drying-brown and clumping his eyelashes). Sitting beside him, weeping (also slightly less crystalline, and more mud-caked, tears), the tiniest subconscious sliver of Chrome's mind, that part not immediately taken with the priority of worrying about this terrible situation which has befallen them, remembers the drama of her imagination. She will hold him, and he will confess words of endearment.

Only his actual, original body is unmoving, unbreathing. Fluffing his wings beside her, Mukuro pivots his head and, says (quorkingly), "Why are you crying?"

Which prompts her to cry even more furiously while he sits beside her and stares.

~*~

In the end, there were no words of Eternal, Undying Love. No birds began to chirp and sing. The only object in the vicinity which might have chirped was Mukuro himself, if only because he didn't quite know what noise owls habitually made, or rather how to successfully imitate it. Mukuro, being Sort of a Sociopath, honestly could not discern why Chrome was having so many feelings while looking at his broken, empty body. Broken bodies were something he'd had a lot of experience with, really. Feelings weren't.

Troubling was the fact that, even after they returned home, Chrome kept having feelings and feeling things. One day, Mukuro was lying back on the couch listening to music on his headphones (because one needed some relaxation after the ordeal of having one's body stolen and the not-altogether-minor existential crisis of life as an owl-shaped weapon) when, looking up, he spied Chrome standing before him, eye red and puffy.

He pulled the headphones off and asked, "What's wrong?"

"I -- I -- " (Chrome, eloquent as usual.) "Mukuro-sama."

She then wiped her eye with her sleeve and disappeared once more, as if nothing had happened. 

Later, bypassing the makeshift Kokuyo dining area, Mukuro saw Chrome opening a bag of chocolate puffs, to which he said, "You know, that's not really adequate nutrition. I need to see about having a stove installed. Although I don't know who I would possess to cook for me. Chikusa could, I think -- "

Chrome promptly burst into tears. Mukuro scratched his chin and tried to think of the most polite way to explain to her that it wasn't as if he was trying to be insulting; it was only that her rice balls were of a most _dubious_ quality. And who cared about something so laborious as cooking, anyway? Better to have minions do it for you.

"Chrome," he said, gently.

Once again, she calmed down for an interval of time. Later, however, Mukuro caught her sniffling and sitting in the bathroom (the door being open), rubbing her scented lotion on her hands and arms and face, biting her lip with that pathetic sort of look, eye bright with tears. Somehow, from the lotion or from sweat, or perhaps even from the tears on her face of her other eye, Chrome's eyepatch had become soggy, wilted and dirty. Mukuro removed it without a second thought, helping her tie a fresh one on.

"What a terrible situation," he said, all beneficent, mournful smiling.

She nodded, faintly.

~*~

Those weeks, she had not been able to stop the flow of tears, the weakening of knees, the trembling of shoulders, the sniffling and lip-biting. It was like a laughing spell, when something triggers you as funny, and you break into peals of sound throughout the day. Only, in this case, it was rather the opposite. Something had tickled Chrome's insides with frustration and despair. She overheard Ken (ever the tactful one) asking Mukuro-sama if "that stupid girl" was "on the rag or something." After a night in which she paced about, crying intermittently, and intermittently waking everyone in the household _(not that they were concerned or anything)_ , Mukuro had his fill of the situation, consulted Reborn, placed Chrome in Namimori, and promptly fled from her and all of her Feelings via an airplane to France.

Something, for both of them, had gone horribly wrong. It had not been disappointment with the lack of a Confession of Undying Love. Although Chrome's romantic ideals were being somewhat compromised under the cold light of day filtering in through the shattered windows and Mukuro sleeping sprawled on the couch with his hand over his head and his pants undone enough for pubic thatch to creep out, surrounded by half-empty glasses of various, slightly terrifying, potentially now-living substances -- Chrome was not easily daunted. A lesser woman might have shrank from the routine filth and unsightly personal habits of her comrades, but Chrome had nerves of steel by dint of aloofness and a tendency for her mind to almost always exist somewhere half in space.

It was this mind-in-space tendency which now turned against her, prompting irrational, inarticulate bouts of misery. In the warm sunlight of Namimori, feeling slightly better (now and then), Chrome had attempted to convey her distress to Kyoko and Haru. Something, somewhere, must have gotten lost in the translation, for she later heard Kyoko telling Haru, "Chrome-chan's boyfriend broke up with her!" to which Haru responded, "Chrome-chan's boyfriend? Was he really?" to which Kyoko responded again, "They had such cute matching hairstyles! We have to be nice to Chrome-chan now because she's sad."

Chrome was not actually sure how they got all that from "Mukuro-sama left," (Kyoko: gasp) and "he left a note" (Kyoko: pat, patting her shoulder), and "it sent me here" ("poor Chrome-chan!"). This explanation was given with much pausing in between, as Chrome never did really care for words, nor did she care for the usage of words.

Then, people became angry. People like Gokudera-san. Chrome didn't understand.

She decided to focus on her schoolwork, but focusing on schoolwork became increasingly difficult when you had decided to reject your own internal organs-by-proxy. Soon enough, Chrome had snot all over her homework sheets; then, one day, she felt woozy, slipped down, rolled into a ditch, and watched her assignments blow away in the breeze, exclaiming, simply, "Ah!"

For Chrome, "Ah!" was a phrase which served on many occasions.

In an act of good self-care, Chrome dragged herself back to her apartment and applied antiseptic to her bloody knees. This, however, did little for her continually rotting rejected organs, which was perhaps a more pressing issue. Her own fright, her realization of her own internalization, had begun to petrify her.

~*~

"A bandage to a knee," Reborn says, tipping his hat, "is an easy solution. Visible. Obvious. But an ache in the heart is not so effortlessly dispatched with."

Chrome, pumped with anaesthesia, vaguely dreaming of an arctic seal pup rolling over in her lap (seal pups were very cute; Chrome liked looking at them as she liked looking at kittens), had a certain sense that the adult baby sitting in the hospital chair beside her (which was never a product of anaesthesia, strangely enough as it were) was making the observation that she had only been handling her most superficial problems, ignoring the roots from which they sprang. She nodded vaguely. That did seem to be a possibility. 

"Yes," she said.

She had asked Boss to put her on the team, but once again, it was as if he wasn't quite hearing or understanding her. If Chrome didn't use words in a healthy condition, she certainly was disinclined to use words, now. It did occur to her, passingly, that if she remained in the hospital, her class ranking might actually fall as low as Boss's. She was not terribly displeased by the thought; in fact, they could have solace together, maybe.

When Reborn asked, "Chrome Dokuro, what do you want to be, relative to Rokudo Mukuro?"

Chrome blinked. Shuddered into awareness. Remembered, body seizing, her original (ideal) narrative in which Mukuro had lain in her arms, dramatically, and she had tearfully waited for him to express his undying love. Admittedly, they two had somewhat botched the romantic tone the first time around, what with his aviatic form and the fact that "Ow" had been one of his first words upon waking, but Chrome was still alive. Mukuro was still alive. She loved him, and there was hope. There was now absolutely no chance of him eating mice for all eternity (one would _think_ ) or of him hanging, suspended in water, or sprouting unfortunate tongues from his body's chest.

Realistically speaking, this was really a fortuitous time for a love confession, even if it had to come from her. 

Well, fortuitous sans the missing organs. 

But a mere flesh wound, that.

~*~

After _Chrome_ confessed her undying love to Mukuro (who finally, after sharing a body with her for months, began to understand the strange tingles he had felt in her crotch when they talked sometimes), he reflected that her timing was good. What could be a more romantic atmosphere than amid a triplicate of zombies? And then, some fine, old-fashioned zombie dismemberment; a perfectly suited lovers' past-time for them.

"Truthfully," he tells her later, "you had me at the mutilation of the undead."

Chrome smiled. Sort of like she did at cats. Sort of like she expected him to begin talking about how all of life was darkness and suffering and he had walked the dreaded path of darkness through six tiers of life or something; Mukuro-sama made everything charming. (Which was reciprocal, because Mukuro had secretly packed Verde's equipment in Chrome's Hello Kitty duffle bag during such moments when he was not using it, even though Hello Kitty had no place in a world drowned in a sea of blood.)

And this was the person she loved, who had lately tried to coerce her into fighting him, after she had rejected his illusory parts, after he had been freed from a jail sentence for wreaking havoc on the mafia world. 

You had to try a little unconvention with such a love story, sometimes.

Flowers would never have worked, unless they were lotuses.

 

Summoning murder crows, however, had a little more _panache_.


End file.
